The article is an attempt at – yet once again – finding a source of more fitting metaphor for the study of consciousness inside the framework of quantum mechanics. It starts by doubting into the possibility of the naturalization of research of experience. Proceeding from that it searches for a more adequate way to implement Varela’s idea about a balanced bridging the explanatory gap. By comparing certain positions of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanical phenomena with the properties of introspection, it tries to point out that there might exist better epistemic positions for understanding consciousness than the ones most frequently used today.

Phenomenology and empirical research are not naturally compatible and devising an empirical technique aiming at researching experience is a challenge. This article presents second-person in-depth phenomenological inquiry – a technique that tries to meet this challenge by allowing the transformation of a participant greatly interested in the investigation of their own subjective experience, into a co-researcher. It then provides an example of this technique being used in a study on enaction of beliefs, more closely showing the cooperative research process of researcher and co-researcher and its result: a grounded theory. The article ends with a discussion on the techniques strengths and weaknesses.

Context: Neurophenomenology lies at a rich intersection of neuroscience and lived human experience, as described by phenomenology. As a new discipline, it is open to many new questions, methods, and proposals. Problem: The best available scientific ontology for neurophenomenology is based in dynamical systems. However, dynamical systems afford myriad strategies for organizing and representing neurodynamics, just as phenomenology presents an array of aspects of experience to be captured. Here, the focus is on the pervasive experience of subjective time. There is a need for concepts that describe synchronic (parallel) features of experience as well as diachronic (dynamic) structures of temporal objects. Method: The paper includes an illustrative discussion of the role of temporality in the construction of the awareness of objects, in the tradition of Husserl, James, and most of 20th century phenomenology. Temporality illuminates desiderata for the dynamical concepts needed for experiment and explanation in neurophenomenology. Results: The structure of music – rather than language – is proposed as a source for descriptive and explanatory concepts in a neurophenomenology that encompasses the pervasive experience of duration, stability, passing time, and change. Implications: The toolbox of cognitive musicology suddenly becomes available for dynamical systems approaches to the neurophenomenology of subjective time. The paper includes an illustrative empirical study of consonance and dissonance in application to an fMRI study of schizophrenia. Dissonance, in a sense strongly analogous to its acoustic musical meaning, characterizes schizophrenia at all times, while emerging in healthy brains only during distracting and demanding tasks. Constructivist content: Our experience of the present is a continuous and elaborate construction of the retention of the immediate past and anticipation of the immediate future. Musical concepts are almost entirely temporal and constructivist in this temporal sense – almost every element of music is constructed from relations to non-present musical/temporal contexts. Musicology may offer many new constructivist concepts and a way of thinking about the dynamical system that is the human brain.

This article summarily presents the explicitation interview with some examples of interviews. In the first part, referring to three excerpts from protocols, we consider some of the techniques used to guide a subject into an introspective posture. We show how these techniques create conditions conducive to access to pre-reflective knowledge, knowledge stemming from a moment of action experienced by the subject, of which the subject has no knowledge in the mode of reflective consciousness. Some of this knowledge is in fact surprising both for the interviewer and for the interviewee. The experience or the expertise of the subject interviewed is invariably increased as a result. In the second part, we provide a brief insight into the fields of application of the explicitation interview, with reference to three case studies, which are presented in a vivid and detailed way (in the fields of sport, health and training, and artistic creation) We conclude with a very brief panorama of the various known fields of application of the explicitation interview.

McInerney R. G. (2013) Neurophenomenological praxis: Its applications to learning and pedagogy. In: Gordon S. (ed.) Neurophenomenology and its applications to psychology\>Neurophenomenology and its applications to psychology. Springer, New York: 25–60. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/4145

Excerpt: The purpose of this chapter is to first explore potential hybrid theories and methodologies that will help to explicate specific and immediate moments of learning, such as situated learning as well as embodied and enactive learning and, second, to advocate for the use of a pedagogical portfolio assessment and praxis that is appropriate for adult learners and that values these ways of learning. […] I will synthesize specific ways of learning (situated, embodied, enactive) with a neurophenomenologically inspired pedagogy and praxis for the purpose of liberating these ways of learning from educational subjugation.

Neurophenomenology (Varela 1996) is not only philosophical but also empirical and experimental. Our purpose in this article is to illustrate concretely the efficiency of this approach in the field of neuroscience and, more precisely here, in epileptology. A number of recent observations have indicated that epileptic seizures do not arise suddenly simply as the effect of random fluctuations of brain activity, but require a process of pre-seizure changes that start long before. This has been reported at two different levels of description: on the one hand, the epileptic patient often experiences some warning symptoms that precede seizures from several minutes to hours in the form of very specific lived events. On the other hand, the analyses of brain electrical activities have provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neuronal dynamics several minutes before the electro-clinical onset of a seizure. We review here some of the ongoing work of our research group concerning seizure anticipation. In particular, we discuss experimental evidence of upward (local-to-global) formation of conscious experience and its neural substrate, but also of the downward (global-to-local) determination of local neuronal activity by situated conscious activity and its substrate large-scale neural assemblies. This causal role of conscious experience may lead to new kinds of therapy for epileptic patients.

Napolitani D. (2002) Essays on and by Francisco Varela: An occasion. European Journal of Psychoanalysis 15(%P). Fulltext at https://cepa.info/5516

This essay considers some of the key concepts in the work of Francisco Varela and of some of his commentators. The author draws on a personal experience in the course of the essay that embodies particular cognitive and affective emergences. The account of the “private” experience becomes the link by which the formulation of certain theoretic terms becomes part of the co-evolutionary fabric of intersubjectivity.

Our aim in ‘Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?’ was to call attention to some problematic assumptions of one widespread approach to investigating the relation between consciousness and the brain – the research programme based on trying to find neural correlates of the contents of consciousness (content-NCCs). Our aim was not to cast doubt on the importance of neuroscientific research on consciousness in general (contrary to Baars’s impresssion). Nor was it to engage in philosophical debates far removed from the concerns of scientists (as McLaughlin & Bartlett may think). Rather, it was to target some problematic assumptions of a particular empirical research programme, and by bringing them to light, to suggest that there may be other, more profitable ways to investigate the contribution of brain processes to conscious experience than searching for content NCCs. Most of the commentators (Bayne, Freeman, Hardcastle, Haynes & Rees, Hohwy & Frith, Metzinger, Myin, Roy, Searle, Van Gulick), though certainly not all (Baars, Jack & Prinz, McLaughlin & Bartlett) seem to have read us this way, and we are grateful for their critical reflections on our article. In this Authors’ Reply, we cannot respond in detail to every point raised by the commentators, so we shall limit ourselves to addressing the most important issues that we see arising from the commentaries collectively.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the neurophenomenologi- cal project on epileptic seizure anticipation, and to sum up the methodological diffi- culties we met. The analysis of neuroelectric signals with new mathematical methods has provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neu- ronal dynamics a few minutes before the seizure onset: do these neurodynamical modifications correspond to any modifications in the patients’ subjective experience, and which ones? This paper describes our attempt to correlate these two dimensions of seizure anticipation, the neuroelectric one and the phenomenological one. The em- phasis is put on the phenomenological dimension and the problems related with the description of the patients’ subjective experience. We also describe the different levels of correlation we explored between first person and third person data, stressing the methodological difficulties we met at each level. In conclusion, we evaluate the re- sults of the project and the relevance of the neuro-phenomenological approach on the therapeutic, methodological and epistemic levels…